Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Perspective 101 for Defeatists

Updated and bumped: 6/26 - still waiting for an honest leftist to comment.

Bumped, because it has generated so much interest, and, so far, baffled the leftists who have commented but don't have the intellectual orientation to understand the point of the chart.

Updated, because I had neglected to indicate the duration (45 months) of US military operations - note that the WWII average monthly casualty rate is shorter, to reflect the timescale on the original Appeal For Courage chart. The visual scale for number of casualties was and is the same.

A couple of weeks ago I posted this chart, from the active-duty service members' petition, the Appeal For Courage. It contrasts monthly deaths in Iraq with those during Vietnam.

My son, an engineering student at RIT and always interested in hard data, suggested adding the monthly deaths from World War II to the chart. Unfortunately, while I was able to locate total casualty figures, no one seems to have broken them out by month. Perhaps the journalists of the time were less interested in destroying the American public's morale than they are now.

Thus, I've been forced to add a monthly average. 405,399 total American deaths average to 9009 per month for the 45 months that the US was involved in WWII combat operations.